The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Miguel Arteta‘s Youth in Revolt out of a previously slated 10.30 opening in favor of a winter doldrums counter-programming slot on 1.15.10. Presumably Bob and Harvey have figured that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which opens wide on 10.28, along with the other 10.30 openers — Endgame, Gentlemen Broncos, The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day, etc. — comprise too much competition. And that the new 1.15 competitors — Book of Eli and the Weinsteins’ own Hoodwinked Too! — are less so.

Naah, that’s not it. It’s something else, I bet. It always is.

In his 9.17 story about the delay, Variety‘s Dave McNary called Youth in Revolt “a potential awards contender.” News to me. What categories was McNary thinking of?

I saw Youth in Revolt in Toronto. I was half-okay with it, but it’s significant, I feel, that I didn’t write or post anything. The truth is that it’s just another adventures of a young horny dude movie gussied up with a witty, sophisticated script by Gustin Nash. Yes, of course — it’s preferable to sit through one of these things when the characters say wise and pithy things, but it’s basically the same old ghoulash. And the exalted reputation of C.D.Payne‘s original 1993 epistolary novel and all the sequels and their popularity among under-35ers doesn’t change that.

Nearly every critic has tired of Michael Cera‘s repetitive zone-case personality, and has raved about his “Francois Dillinger” incarnation in Youth in Revolt because it allows Cera to play dark and semi-perverse. But let’s not get carried away. It’s just a bit in a witty but very familiar-seeming film. Just a moustache, really.